Real Politician of Louisiana, at Home

‘The Governor’s Wife,’ on A&E, Follows Life of Edwin Edwards

People marvel at the resourcefulness — and Dickensian plight — of waste recyclers in Mumbai shantytowns, those so-called slumdogs who gather, sort, crush and reconstitute mountains of paper, plastics, metals and glass.

But American television, while not quite as efficient, also has a rather impressive way of recycling dirt.

“The Governor’s Wife,” a new reality series starting Sunday on A&E, is a case in point. The show chronicles the family antics of a former Louisiana governor, Edwin W. Edwards, 84 when filming started, and his third wife, Trina, 50 years his junior. The couple met when she became his prison pen pal while Mr. Edwards was serving time for, among other things, extortion and racketeering. “My favorite saying is you’re only as young as the woman you feel,” he says.

The show is hardly a bid for political rehabilitation by Mr. Edwards. Louisiana is a state with an elastic view of disgrace and Mr. Edwards, who won four terms, is famous for having said that the only way he could lose an election was to be caught in bed with a “dead girl or a live boy.”

Most of all, “The Governor’s Wife” is the effluence of hit dramas like “Scandal” and “The Good Wife,” which distill real-life trespasses, especially Bill Clinton’s affair with Monica Lewinsky, Rod R. Blagojevich’s corruption problem and Eliot Spitzer’s arrangement with prostitutes, which led him to resign as governor. (It also didn’t help his bid for New York City comptroller).

Photo

The Governor’s Wife Trina Edwards, with her husband, Edwin, who served terms in the State House and in federal prison.Credit
A&E

Scripted television usually takes first crack at this kind of material — and no show recycles faster than “Law & Order: SVU,” which recently worked in the sexting scandal of Anthony Weiner, the former Democratic Congressman from New York, and in another episode, did a masterly mash-up of the Trayvon Martin killing case, Paula Deen and New York’s stop-and-frisk program.

But reality shows have a remarkable ability to skim off the sludge by finding real people willing to re-enact tabloid stories. On one occasion, the producers of “The Real Housewives of D.C.” actually got ahead of the process by casting social-climbing Michaele Salahi before she and her then-husband, Tareq, crashed a White House state dinner in 2009.

“The Governor’s Wife” siphons the popularity of “The Good Wife,” and blends it into some of reality television’s most successful formulas, including “The Real Housewives” franchise, “Duck Dynasty” and even “Here Comes Honey Boo Boo.” Mr. Edwards has two daughters in their 60s, Victoria and Anna, who together look like a living tribute to the Bette Davis-Joan Crawford movie “What Ever Happened to Baby Jane?”

Mr. Edwards is the star, but the story is told from Trina’s point of view. She has two teenage sons from a previous marriage, but finds herself treated like a wayward child by her stepdaughters.

Trina plans a surprise 85th-birthday party for her husband, and decides that she should jump out of a cake. Anna has her doubts.

On the show, the hardest part isn’t conception, it’s telling Victoria, who is the fiercer of the sisters. Victoria, who proudly claims to have been an accomplished actress and dancer in her youth, smokes electronic cigarettes and wears heavy eye makeup, sequined tops and electric blue Bermuda shorts as casual wear. She describes Trina as a “trollop.”

The family feuding is played for laughs, but there is some pathos peeking out of the margins. The Edwards clan lives in Gonzales, La., a small town about 20 miles from Baton Rouge that doesn’t exactly look like a mother lode for gold diggers. The Edwards house is big and appropriately gaudy, but Trina gets her hair teased out in a shabby strip-mall storefront called the Parlour Salon. The birthday party is sparsely attended, in a no-frills banquet hall in Baton Rouge.

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Family life seems to run on fumes and the practiced gallantry of Mr. Edwards. Victoria is not thrilled when asked to come over and sit for Trina’s sons so her father and stepmother can go out to lunch. He greets her by saying, “When I was a teenager, my mama wouldn’t let no good-looking baby sitter like you take care of me.”

Sweet talk only goes so far. When Trina finally breaks the baby news to her, Victoria is indignant. “Since most of our inheritance went to the federal government,” she hisses at Mr. Edwards, “now it’s going to be split between four?”

Anna, who also didn’t inherit her father’s gift for flattery, describes him as “three toes from the grave.”

But the former governor will leave a legacy, mostly likely in the form of a spinoff.

Correction: October 29, 2013

A television review on Saturday about a new reality series on A&E, “The Governor’s Wife,” about the family of former Gov. Edwin W. Edwards of Louisiana, misspelled the given name of a star of the film “Whatever Happened to Baby Jane?” in describing Mr. Edwards’s daughters as looking “like a living tribute” to that movie. She was Bette Davis, not Betty.